I am a famous writer. In fact, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say my writing has become legendary.
I'm not a household name, but my job application can be found on over 11,000 web sites, according to Google.
In late 1995, a year out of college and my writing career going nowhere, I began self-publishing a humor column on the Internet to try to generate a little publicity. It was a blog of sorts, back before anyone was using the word. I'd jot down my musings on life, dating, politics, etc. and publish them to my site.
It wasn't doing too badly either. I'd picked up about 3,000 e-mail subscribers plus another thousand visitors a day to my site. I'd also developed an offshoot; a "where are they now" column where I used my incredible talents with search engines to dig up the doings of lost stars of the 70s and 80s. That had been picked up by the Internet Movie Database and it was just a few months away from getting blurbed in People, Newsweek, and Wired in the space of a few weeks.
But this was before the days of AdSense and other reputable ad networks that allowed small-traffic publishers in. I'd joined the "Commonwealth Network" only to have them cite a calculation error that turned hundreds of dollars in earnings into a couple of bucks. I'd pick up a small ad contract here and there to help pay expenses, and of those 90,000+ hits that turn up on Google for my name, a few hundred are for archives of posts to the "online-ads" mailing list where various small publishers and advertisers discussed ways to maximize revenues.
So, to make ends meet, I'd been doing temp and contract jobs, picking up a freelance writing assignment here and there, but I was looking for something a little steadier to smooth out the peaks and valleys in my income. I became frustrated with the job-hunting process, particularly having to fill out job applications. In response to that, I decided to write a column in which I very sarcastically answered the questions on a standard job application.
Soon enough that joke found its way onto some mailing lists. But the person who sent it had, stripped my introduction, copyright notice, and one of the questions, added the statement that the application was actually submitted at a fast food "joint", and it began getting circulated around Usenet and various mailing lists... with my name still on it as the applicant.
It circulated pretty hot and heavy over the next few years. I actually had a job interview one day and the interviewer got it from a friend (who didn't know about me) the next day. My step-sister (who has a different last name) got it from a friend of hers with the note "this guy is so funny. If he was real I'd marry him." Since I was in Los Angeles and they were in New York, nothing came of it, but my step-sister did have some fun with her friend. Another time it was going around my best friend's office. He called me from a conference room, the call on speaker, with half his office crammed into the room to prove to them that I was real, I wrote it as a joke, and I never worked for McDonalds.
By the end of the last century, my job application had joined the ranks of the person who paid $250 for the Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe and the offer from Bill Gates to send you $1000 for forwarding an e-mail. It had become an urban legend.
As of the last time I checked Google, it was on 11,000 pages, nearly 7,000 of them still sporting my name. I have a Google alert set up so Google mails me whenever it spots a new page with my name and it pops up about 5-6 new pages a week with the job application. The latest variant has changed the claim that I'm a 17-year-old boy in Florida who submitted the application at McDonalds to me being a 75-year-old retiree who submitted it at Wal-Mart for a job as a greeter.
Some day my writing may make me a household name, or perhaps I'll give into the performing bug I indulged back in college and become a well-known actor, or maybe I'll get a great brainstorm for a new business and become the next Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates... and in the mean time my urban legend will continue to grow and get more embellished until, at a press conference, a reporter will stand up and ask: "Is it true that you once worked for McDonalds, got fired, and then wrote the 'Secret Sauce' virus which causes people's hard drives to be overwritten with your job application when they open an e-mail titled 'Make Burgers Fast'?"
I'll just refer them to my press agent, Craig Shergold, who'll be glad to take their card.
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